


This Living Hand

by apocryphal



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-03
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 20:39:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocryphal/pseuds/apocryphal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur was supposed to lie in wait for England's moment of need, but it never came. It never will come. So instead, Merlin's bringing him back for his own moment of need.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Living Hand

**Author's Note:**

> Looking for a beta for a longer Merlin fic, modern AU paranormal crime drama with explicit Merlin/Arthur. Looking for someone to kick my ass. Comment or PM if interested. Also, a huge thank you to maeve100 for brit-picking this for me!

  
**This Living Hand**   


 

Merlin stopped aging when Arthur died. Almost.

 

Merlin’s body except for his left middle finger, where the iron ring bearing the mark of Avalon rests at the base and refuses to come off, stopped aging when Arthur died. He’s looked no older than thirty-eight for a thousand years save for that one finger, which has rotted down to bone over the centuries and which he keeps hidden under a soft pair of black leather gloves when he goes out in public.

 

oOo

 

When he requests that they give Arthur back to him, they deposit the ornately-carved wooden box—casket—at his feet and then wink out of existence without taking their ring back. They’re scared. They know what’s coming as well as everyone else does.

 

“Really?” Merlin demands of the still lake. “You couldn’t have put him in the bloody car? It’s  _right there!_ ”

 

They don’t return.

 

Merlin pulls with all his might on the heavy casket, red-faced and trembling with effort, and manages to move it maybe five inches.

 

“You are absolutely, without question, the  _only_  person in the world who could possibly be this annoying when you’ve been dead for eleven sodding centuries,” Merlin mutters as he heaves and tugs and nearly pulls his arms out of their sockets in his efforts to move the bloody casket. “The only one. And what would you say if you could hear me now? You’d say, ‘Well, Merlin, if you weren’t such a girl about exercising’, or ‘That’ll teach you to rely on magic for the formative years of your life, Merlin’…”

 

oOo

 

As Merlin drives, he talks to Arthur to pass the time. Traffic is a nightmare—which is to be expected, when the whole bloody world is migrating to bloody _Wales_ , land of winding, one-car-width roads—and there’s nothing but automated government messages on the radio, and he never has the patience for people nowadays anyway.

 

“Like—look at that girl over there,” he says, meaning the car that they’ve been inching alongside with for the last hour. “Got her two kids in the backseat, she’s on her sodding mobile. ‘Course, you don’t know what a mobile is, do you?”

 

He’s watched the world progress over the centuries, metal and glass overtaking wood and stone with every new drop of cynicism that spills out from laboratories into the soil of the Earth, growing and feeding and sustaining the people of this planet.

 

“I meant to bring you back,” Merlin offers. “Probably should have done. I’d have fed you McDonalds and told you it was fine cuisine of the times, and probably gave you some really awful kit to go with it, told you it was common. Plaid leisure suit, maybe.”

 

The image of Arthur in a plaid leisure suit coalesces in his mind.

 

“And a really hideously-patterned shirt underneath,” he adds. “Some pink-tinted sunglasses, too.”

 

A pause.

 

“Now look what she’s done—sticking them with one of those portable DVD-playing things,” Merlin says, suddenly noticing the car next to him again. “You’d think she’d some really terrible allergy to talking to them. You’d think now, of all times—”

 

He breaks off.

 

Notices that the car behind him is being driven by a group of twelve-year-old boys, price still scrawled on the windshield in fluorescent orange.

 

“Mad,” Merlin mutters. “The lot of them, they’re all mad.”

 

oOo

 

“The thing is,” Merlin says, a few hours later when he thinks he can see the marked-off field in the distance, “if I’d woken you up to this world, I don’t think you could have  _handled_  how much it’s changed. So much is different.”

 

The sky is grayer to the west, where the industrial fumes of Cardiff are, for whatever reason, still being pumped into the air.

 

Car horns are honking.  _The Clash_  are horribly blasting from someone’s speakers.

 

The steady hum of the car around them makes the world vibrate ever so slightly.

 

“You never did deal well with change,” Merlin tells Arthur. “Never did.”

 

oOo

 

“Is that a coffin?” the Welshman demands, staring at Arthur’s casket. “A bloody  _coffin_  you’re bringin’ here?”

 

“Are you going to help move it or not?” Merlin asks impatiently.

 

He really, really has no patience for huma—people these days.

 

“Is there a body in it, then?”

 

“It’s a family heirloom,” Merlin says.

 

The Welshman squints. “Are you Turkish?”

 

“Yes,” Merlin answers. “Yes, I am. Now will you help me move it?”

 

The Welshman shakes his head, mutters something about the “bloody Turks”, and starts rolling up his sleeves.

 

oOo

 

“Well, that only took two hours,” Merlin says, sitting back on his butt and staring at the small fire he’s finally managed to coax into existence. “I don’t think I’ve done that in at least three hundred years, and back then I still had a spark or two of magic left, didn’t I?”

 

The casket—coffin—whatever—is laid out next to him, shut tight. Silent.

 

Merlin glances around and then leans in, speaking in a whisper. “They all think I’m a nutter. The Turkish nutter with the casket.”

 

He pauses to add another twig to the fire he’s gotten going.

 

“At least you’re good for something, though,” Merlin thinks to add in a normal voice, patting the casket appreciatively. “Look at all this lovely space we’ve got. Everyone else all packed in like sardines, but they’ve given us a wide berth, haven’t they?”

 

Just to emphasize the point to himself, he stretches out his long legs. Two yards away, a man sits squashed between two pup tents and glares at Merlin’s display.

 

“No one wants to sit next to the crazy person,” Merlin says proudly, a smug smile filling out his face.

 

The fire crackles and smokes a lot because the wood is a wet—it’s Wales, Merlin would expect nothing less—and he takes a moment to survey his fellow… campers.

 

He seems to have accidentally ended up somewhere in the middle of a caravan of university students, judging by all the music and shagging and clinking bottles that he can hear. It’s interspersed with the sound of conversation and, yes, crying. Like that’s useful.

 

Beyond the students, he thinks he can see some religious group or other, probably the Catholics, yelling about God’s wrath and repenting and suchlike. There don’t seem to be too many people with children. Merlin suspects that parental instincts probably mean that most parents are squirreled away underground where they think they’ll be safe. Either that, or they’ve plans to kill the children in their sleep just before it hits so that they’ll die peacefully. There do seem to be a lot of pets around here, though. People are so very attached to their dogs these days.

 

Oddly, or perhaps not if you think about it, there isn’t a single sheep in sight.

 

“Weird, isn’t it? Used to be ‘Wales: where the men are strong and the sheep are nervous’, and now it’s… ‘Wales: where the sheep have fucked off and the men are nervous’,” Merlin says—and then he laughs at his own joke.

 

He could probably print that up on t-shirts and make money, if he had the time.

 

“See, now I’m definitely a nutter,” Merlin says cheerfully, putting a hand on the casket again. “I’m giggling to myself and everything.”

 

The man squashed between the pup tents glares harder.

 

Merlin resists the urge to stick his tongue out.

 

“I could wake you up tonight, you know,” Merlin says, thinking aloud. His hand is still on the casket. “You’d be so angry at first. You’d probably start screaming, waving that bloody sword of yours around—I can just see Squashed Man’s face now—and then you’d calm down and start shaking, maybe crying. I’d probably get a hug out of the whole thing, actually.”

 

He can see it. He can see Arthur as he was a thousand years ago, face flushed with anger, eyes swimming with confusion…

 

Maybe. Probably. They say that your memory of something is only a reincarnation of the last time you remembered it, and Merlin’s been re-remembering Arthur’s face for more than a thousand years. By now his image of Arthur is probably so warped that when he finally opens up the casket, the face he’ll see—

 

Merlin forces himself to breathe.

 

“I won’t, though,” he tells the casket. “I won’t wake you up tonight. It’d be…”

 

He glances around at the partying students, the zealots, the fireworks, the idiots running around starkers yelling, “Fuck me bloody, fuck me bloody, fuck me bloody!” and casts about for the proper letters.

 

“Cruel,” he says at last, though it feels too small a word. “It’d be cruel.”

 

oOo

 

“I was right, you know,” Merlin tells Arthur—the casket—whatever—the following morning. “And I don’t know why I’ve suddenly got all this to say to you, by the way. I never had these nutty one-sided conversations with you before I dragged you back into the real world. Never had conversations at all. I don’t think you’d actually believe how little I’ve spoken over the last few hundred years—I’m not the chatterbox I used to be, Arthur.”

 

He pauses, and then pushes onward before he can really reflect more on that statement.

 

“But I was right. I told myself that I would bring you back when the England needed you most. I had such a small mind back then—I couldn’t have begun to imagine how well the world would carry on without you. See, England never needed you again. You’d served your purpose in uniting her, and you did it so well that you weren’t ever needed to do it again.”

 

Merlin sighs and switches his position so that his back is up against one of the sides of the casket.

 

“I knew during the Blitz,” Merlin says, nodding to himself a little. “That’s the first time I remember consciously knowing and not denying it. Bombs were falling from the sky, people were screaming, children were running everywhere, there was smoke and whistles and burning flesh and I thought… ‘What could Arthur do to stop this?’”

 

“Nothing,” Merlin replies, answering his own question. “Absolutely nothing, of course. What can one man do against a bloody world war? England was never going to need you again. It had just been… arrogance. Foolish, naïve arrogance.”

 

“And now I’ve brought you here,” he sighs, glancing down the long length of the casket. “Because I was right.”

 

He can’t bring himself to define where ‘here’ is. Not out loud, and not to Arthur.

 

oOo

 

The boy has been skirting around his area for the last five minutes or so. He can’t be older than eight, though he might just be tall for his age. He’s got a gangly look about him, and the shock of red hair that sticks straight up from his head only adds to that.

 

“Lost, are you?” Merlin finally asks, when he gets bored of watching the boy attempt to lurk about.

 

The boy shakes his head, looking guilty. “My mam’s over that way, sir. Told me to leave off while she has herself a piss.”

 

Merlin raises his eyebrows. “I’m sure she’s done by now.”

 

The boy glances at the sky. There’s been something small and dark up there for a few hours now, the size of an ant.

 

“Mam says it’s coming tomorrow morning,” the boy tells him. “She says that little dot up there? It’s gonna grow really big, bigger than my school, even.”

 

“Mm,” says Merlin.

 

“Do you think it’ll be that big?” the boy asks.

 

“Bigger,” Merlin replies.

 

His dark eyes widen.

 

Merlin waits, but the boy continues to not leave.

 

“What’s in the box, sir?” the boy asks, eyes wandering over to the thing that had obviously caught his attention in the first place. “It’s awful big, is all. I don’t know what I’d put in a box that big, if I had one, except maybe lots of rocks from the beach.”

 

“Why don’t you go back and find your mum?” Merlin suggests.

 

“But what’s in it?”

 

“Something very important.”

 

“Is it gold?” the boy asks in a hushed tone, eyes widening. “Pirate gold?”

 

“More important than that,” Merlin says.

 

The boy’s brow furrows. “Is it… drawings?”

 

“No.”

 

“Chocolates?”

 

Merlin rolls his eyes. “Look, your mum’s probably worried about you—”

 

“Is it for the thing in the sky?” the boy interrupts. “Is it going to make it get smaller, when it gets too big?”

 

Unwarranted, Merlin’s breath suddenly catches in his throat.

 

“It’ll make it seem that way,” he says, with a little difficulty. “For me, at least.”

 

The boy’s eyes widen. “Wow. Is it a laser? A tractor beam, like in that movie with—”

 

“Ieuan Williams!” A woman who must be the boy’s mother comes tromping over with her face set in a furious expression. “It might be the bloody end of the world, but that’s not to stop me from smacking that ornery bottom of yours if you’re not over here by the time I get to three. One!”

 

What had taken her so long? Honestly.

 

“Best go,” Merlin says, nodding at the boy.

 

“Two!”

 

Ieuan sends a last, regretful look at the casket before rushing off to his mother.

 

“Thr—oh, you’re just under the nose, there. Devil-child, you are. Come on.”

 

Ieuan is herded away, leaving Merlin and the casket alone again. Feeling oddly desolate, Merlin puts a hand on the smooth wood and rubs it, closing his eyes.

 

oOo

 

Merlin lies on top of the coffin as the sun starts to set. He closes his eyes and tells Arthur about the century he spent in a tiny mining town in the Outback, managing a hotel in a mountainside. He tells Arthur travelers tales, about six-foot long earthworms, about a jellyfish with a sting so painful that the man had been screaming even after the doctors had sedated him—about a Prime Minister that had simply  _gone_   _missing_  one day, probably eaten by sharks, and about a bridge in Sydney that was one year and one meter short of being the largest bridge in the world.

 

“And the sunsets,” Merlin breathes, one hand gripping the edge of the casket to ground himself. “God, Arthur, if you had seen those sunsets.”

 

The one before them is all pastels of yellow and pink, washing everything out and so far from the beauty of the bush that it could almost be called ugly.

 

Luckily, Merlin’s eyes are closed and the casket lid hasn’t been opened in over a thousand years, so neither one of them sees it.

 

oOo

 

“It’s just—you know, where else are you going to be?” Merlin asks that night, still atop the coffin. “I think you’d agree. Probably. I mean, obviously, I’m not the only one with the idea, look at how many others turned up. And you always did like to be on the front line of things.”

 

“On the other hand,” Merlin says, reconsidering, “you’d probably think of this as giving up. You’d be one of those people bunking down in the wilds of Canada, trying to save all the women and children and giving impassioned speeches about the resilience of humanity. That’s why it’s better this way.”

 

Merlin snorts. “Arrogant prat.”

 

But then irritation bubbles up inside of him out of nowhere, hot and scratchy, and words suddenly burst from his mouth.

 

“Bloody fools, is what they are. Those people up Canada, you know, all of them that are holed up in bunks thinking they’ll survive this? I hate them. I  _hate_ them. That’s the arrogance of the human race, thinking they’re too clever, too bloody  _special_ —”

 

Merlin closes his eyes and clenches his teeth as he feels angry tears prickle his eyes.

 

“How dare they think they’re too good to die?” he grits out, one hand squeezing the edge of the casket. “How dare they think that they’re something  _more_ than just a pile of flesh? This is it, Arthur. This is bloody  _it_. There’s only one way to die, and it’s in the same breath as every other living thing on Earth. Together. All of us, we’re going to stop existing and the planet will become a rock and there will be nothing left of us. No pictures. No memories. You can’t escape it, and you shouldn’t bloody try to.”

 

He inhales, exhales. Unclenches his teeth.

 

“It’s the only way to die,” he says, calmer. “When even the concept of death has gone—that’s the only way to die.”

 

His gloved fingers flex on the wood of the casket in time with his breathing.

 

oOo

 

Above them, the dark shape is growing bigger, blotting out more stars with each passing hour.

 

Merlin does not sleep that night. His last night.

 

“You wouldn’t have liked the world anyway,” he tells Arthur over and over again, gripping the casket with both hands and trying not to cry. “You wouldn’t have liked it anyway, you wouldn’t have.”

 

oOo

 

With the rising of the sun comes the beginning of the arguing.

 

They should stand in concentric circles.

 

They should sit in the lotus position.

 

They should sing.

 

They should form a giant human cinnamon roll and spend their last hours hugging.

 

Someone has cleverly marked the supposed center of the impact site by driving a broken tent pole into the ground and pinning the flag of Wales to it. There’s a paper sign beneath it in black marker that reads, ‘GOD SAVE THE QUEEN’, and another one below that which reads, ‘GOD SAVE US ALL’.

 

The crater it forms is going to be so massive that Merlin doesn’t think it all really matters. As long as he and Arthur are killed instantly in the radiation blast and not in a tsunami or an earthquake or a rush of molten lava that’s spilled out from cracked earthen crust, he’s happy.

 

The black thing in the sky is getting bigger. Probably not bigger than Ieuan’s school.

 

They’re still arguing, and they’re running out of time.

 

oOo

 

The air is beginning to heat up. With all the moisture in the air—because it’s wet, it’s Wales, Merlin expects nothing less—it’s beginning to feel like a rainforest. The black thing is coming at them fast—it won’t be more than two hours now before it hits, maybe an hour before they’re all dead.

 

Merlin opens the lid of the casket with shaking hands.

 

oOo

 

There are people sobbing and singing around him.

 

Merlin’s crying too, but he’s not looking at the sky. He’s staring down at the most beautiful face he’s ever seen, the face of his King, the face that has lived only in his mind for over a thousand years but is no less beautiful and exactly as he remembers it, and he can’t stop the tears from pouring down his face. It takes all his willpower to just hold Arthur’s body to him and not bury his face in the rich crimson fabric that used to mean Camelot.

 

He’s sweating madly, now, beads of it dripping into his eyes and running down his face with the tears, and somewhere he can hear people start to gasp and pant.

 

Arthur’s eyes flutter.

 

“Arthur?” Merlin chokes out. The air is getting harder to breathe.

 

Arthur coughs. “Mr’n?”

 

“Open your eyes,” Merlin says desperately. “Open your eyes and look only at me.”

 

Blue eyes slowly open, fixing on him with a few blinks. “What’re you… the hell are you wearing?”

 

Merlin blinks, glances down at his t-shirt, and then realizes what he’s doing.

 

“No, no, no, don’t focus on that,” he says hurriedly, brushing hair back from Arthur’s face. “We haven’t got much time and I—I just wanted you.”

 

“The battle,” Arthur says, struggling to remember. “It was… the battle… God, it’s hot.”

 

“I know,” Merlin says raggedly. He’s crying unstoppably now. “I know it is.”

 

“Merlin, what’s going on? Why are you crying?” Arthur asks.

 

Merlin shakes his head. “No, please, don’t focus on that either.”

 

Arthur’s eyes widen. “Am I dying? Merlin, is that it?”

 

Merlin sobs.

 

“Use your magic! C’mon, a spell, anything—”

 

“My magic’s gone!” Merlin screams, tears pouring down his face. “It’s all wasted away, keeping you safe for a thousand years when I should have been allowed to die! I had a right to die, Arthur, and you stole it, and now it’s all—it’s all for nothing. We’re all going to die here in bloody  _Wales_ , you and me and everyone, we’re all… we’re all going to die.”

 

Arthur stares at him, wide-eyed.

 

Merlin clutches at the fabric on his chest. “I’m wasted away, Arthur. I’m spent. There’s nothing left inside. God—god, there’s nothing left inside. I’m wasted.”

 

The heat is becoming almost painful, now, like he’s starting to sunburn.

 

And Arthur is still staring at him in confusion. That’s when Merlin realizes how wrong he was.

 

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, trying to push himself away from Arthur. “Oh, god, I should have never woken you up. I should have let you die in peace. Oh god, what was I thinking? I’m so sorry, so sorry…”

 

“Merlin, stop crying,” Arthur says, pulling him down. His arms are strong, strong as they were that day on the battlefield, and Merlin lets himself collapse. “It’s—it’s going to be all right.”

 

“It’s so hot,” Merlin chokes out. “Oh god. I’m sorry.”

 

Arthur must see the great black rock descending upon them. He must. But he doesn’t say anything, just tightens his arms around Merlin.

 

“I’m sorry,” Merlin whispers.

 

The heat is becoming too much to bear.

 

People around them are screaming.

 

Merlin pulls the leather glove off of his hand, exposing the rotted bone of his middle finger and the iron ring that still sits there, and this time when he tugs it slides off easily. The ring falls to the ground and almost immediately the tips of his fingers begin to decay before his very eyes. He feels the tiny pieces dissolving back into the Earth, a thousand years too late.

 

“Arthur, I’m dying,” he breathes.

 

“It’s going to be all right,” Arthur says again, even as Merlin is disintegrating in his arms.

 

“It feels so good,” Merlin whispers. “It doesn’t hurt anymore. I don’t feel  _wrong_  anymore.”

 

“It’s going to be all right.”

 

Arthur is clinging to every bit of Merlin still left, the bits that haven’t disintegrated, when the wave of radiation slams into the Earth and finishes the job. 


End file.
